The rope is not a normal gallows rope but the stem of an opium poppy.
Afghanistan is still the world's biggest source of the opium poppy, despite the presence of foreign troops.
This state of lawlessness has allowed the widespread cultivation of the opium poppy, from which heroin is made.
Afghanistan grows nearly all of the world's opium poppy crop in an illegal trade worth billions of dollars.
But the opium poppy still blooms in Kokang and heroin production in the region continued its relentless rise during the early 1990s.
Revenues from cannabis cultivation and production of cannabis resin are similar to or even surpassing those earned from the cultivation of opium poppy.
Further north, coca and opium poppy are now grown in Venezuela.
In fact, Jurm's neighboring district of Khash located on the ancient Silk Road to China is the source of the Afghan word for opium poppy.
Last year he also called on the UK government to licence the opium poppy trade in Afghanistan, to help combat a world shortage in the pain-killing drug morphine.
In a report published at the beginning of February, the UN estimated that the amount of opium poppy cultivated in the volatile southern provinces would increase this year.
Frustrated by government attacks on their opium poppy crops, a growing number of farmers in Afghanistan are turning to a lucrative alternative that is just as illegal: cannabis, the source of marijuana and hashish.
He said the Taliban were being funded partly by opium poppy crops, thriving due to the failure of efforts to eradicate them, from religious extremists and a "combination of criminals, misguided policy objectives and folly".
The government in Kabul has not yet confirmed the report, and the wording is ambiguous: it says the production of heroin is forbidden, but not the cultivation of the opium poppy, from which the heroin is extracted.
He backed aerial spraying of coca and opium-poppy fields, even though it seemed ineffectual.
The UN said last week that opium-poppy production has begun to rise again in Myanmar after six years of sharp declines.
Rumour links ministers from several coalition parties to criminal groups that perpetrate most of Nepal's violence, as well as to the opium-poppy farming which has recently spread in the increasingly lawless south.
Scientists in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh say they have developed a new variety of opium-free poppy seed.
The opium-free poppy seed is the result of five years of research by scientists at the government-run Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants based in Lucknow.
Opium is cultivated from the poppy seed illicitly all over the world and converted into heroin.
This year, however, poppy cultivation and opium production in Afghanistan appears to have decreased sharply .
Opium contained in the traditional breed of poppy has been used by people all over the world for hundreds of years as an effective analgesic.
In more recent years it's become the centre of the poppy growing industry which drives the opium industry in this part of the world.
And as Friday prayers wind down on a recent afternoon in one town, a U.S.-funded poppy-elimination team pressures farmers not to plant opium poppies.
Despite the king's confidence, the country remains unstable, and has seen an attempted coup against Mr Karzai, an assassination attempt against the defence minister, Mohammed Fahim, and riots by poppy farmers, irate at government attempts to destroy their opium-producing crops.
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